Startup Page 24

  “Shhh,” Sabrina said. “You’ll wake Owen and Amelia.”

  “Excellent point,” Dan said. “What if it had been one of them who walked in on you just now?”

  “Oh, come on, Dan. They’d have no idea what was going on.”

  “They’d know that something was fucked up.” He sat down on the bed, facing away from Sabrina. “Jesus. Really? You’re selling your underwear?” His voice sounded normal now. “Who’s even…who buys this shit?”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t actually met any of them, but they seem normal. Ish. No one’s gotten super-creepy.”

  “Wait.” He turned around. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Just a couple of weeks.” Plus a couple of weeks, she thought. Close enough.

  Dan shook his head. “What a world.” They were both quiet for a minute. “Really? This is how you decided to make some cash? It’s just so…gross.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I read about it on this Facebook moms’ group I’m in. It seemed relatively painless. Someone—not me!—asked if anyone knew a good way to make some quick cash working from home, and someone else responded and said she’d been selling her underwear.”

  Dan whistled quietly. “Wow,” he said. “The secret life of moms.”

  “I guess.” She glanced at him. “I thought you’d be more pissed. Not that I was hoping you’d find out, but, you know.”

  “I mean, I’m not thrilled about it,” he said. “But I do wonder…” He paused. “Nah.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s a dumb idea.”

  “Tell me.” She couldn’t believe she was actually sitting here having a somewhat normal conversation with her husband about the fact that she was selling underwear on the internet to strangers. She hadn’t really allowed herself to think about what Dan’s reaction would be if he ever found out, but it wasn’t exactly…this. Had she been secretly hoping he’d find out? Had she wanted to provoke a confrontation with him, something that would end in screaming and tears, something that would jolt her out of her constant low-grade misery?

  “Well…I’m just thinking, you know…this is kind of a fascinating way-we-live-now story, right?” Dan said. “Like—you used social media to find out about it, in this world of private Facebook moms’ groups that I didn’t even know existed.”

  “You’re barely even on Facebook.”

  “I know, it’s kind of a time suck,” Dan said. “Anyway. I’m just thinking…what if you wrote something about it?”

  “Huh? You mean, like, post about it on Facebook?”

  “No, no,” Dan said. “An essay. ‘How Selling My Underwear for Cash Improved My Marriage.’” He smiled. “Or, you know, something along those lines.”

  “That’s rather premature,” she said.

  Dan shrugged. “I mean, things couldn’t really get worse, could they?”

  So he had noticed, then. “If you thought things were so bad,” she said slowly, “how come you never said anything?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I thought things would just get better on their own. They used to before. Or maybe it took catching you selling your underwear for me to realize how bad things had actually gotten.”

  “How bad have things gotten?” She couldn’t look at him.

  “Well,” Dan said, “you’ve stopped being interested in all the stuff we used to love to do. We haven’t gone out to eat with another couple in months. We haven’t gone away together in probably two years. We never have sex. We barely even speak to each other! It feels like we have nothing in common anymore. We even work in the same fucking building and it just feels like we’re operating in different universes.”

  Sabrina could feel the rage boiling up inside of her and willed herself not to scream or do what she really wanted to do, which was claw his face off. “Fuck you,” she said. “Why is that all on me? Why do I have to be the one making the plans to go out to dinner or go away for the weekend? Why can’t you be interested in my day? You have this assumption that whatever it is you’re doing is more interesting than whatever it is that I’m doing.”

  “I think that objectively, yes, my day is more interesting than yours,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s more important, but I think it is more interesting.”

  “Oh, really, fuck you,” she said. “Maybe I’m trying to make mine more interesting, how about that? Maybe I’m sick of going to work and coming home and taking care of the kids until you decide you feel like showing up.”

  “Maybe I’m sick of you not understanding how stressful my job is.”

  “Give me a fucking break,” she said. “You want to know what’s stressful? Stressful is your boss asking to talk to you today and telling you—nicely, but telling you—that you should really have a talk with your husband about the story his site is trying to write about him.”

  “Wait.” Dan sat down on the bed. “He actually said that?”

  “He actually said that,” Sabrina said.

  “Can we write about that? That’s fucked up. He shouldn’t be trying to use you like that. Or can I at least say something to him about that? Privately?”

  “I’d prefer that you didn’t, actually,” Sabrina said. That was all she needed—her husband confronting her boss in some kind of misguided chivalrous gesture.

  “But you know he’s such a douche,” Dan said.

  Sabrina shrugged. “Is he really any better or worse than any other guy in tech?”

  “He’s pretty bad, Sabrina. I mean, before you started working for him, I knew he was bad, but he’s even worse, and his app is so dumb and pointless—like, why do we need something telling us how to cheer up, as though man’s preferred state of being at all times is to be cheerful so that you can do better work or be a better you—which, by the way, is such a startup way of thinking. It’s like they can’t imagine a world where people have actual emotions or feel sad or angry or frustrated; everything has to be fixed immediately—anyway, this guy just sucks.”

  “But…what’s wrong with trying to be happy? I wouldn’t mind trying to be happy, to be perfectly honest.”

  “It’s not that being happy is bad,” Dan said. “It’s the fetishization of happiness and productivity above all else that I take issue with.”

  “Okay.” She thought for a moment. “But it’s not like you don’t want the people who work for you to be productive too.”

  “That’s not the point.” It’s kind of the point, Sabrina thought. But suddenly she was so, so tired. They were silent for a minute. “So will you consider writing that essay?”

  “Oh—um,” Sabrina said. “I don’t think so.”

  “It could be totally anonymous,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to worry about your name coming up in a Google search or anything like that.”

  That was something that hadn’t even occurred to her. But also, was he saying that he wanted her to write it—for him? “Wait. You mean write it for you? For TechScene?”

  “Why not?” Dan stood up. “We publish first-person stuff. And we’re trying to do more—just as long as it has something to do with technology or social media or the internet, you know? Boom. That stuff shares really well too.”

  “No way. Even if it was anonymous. It just feels…gross. And weird. And what if someone figured it out? No.”

  Dan laughed. “That seems unlikely.” He lay down so that his head was near her knees. He looked up at her. “Sorry. I’m just…well, now I’m thinking about seeing you masturbating.” He smiled. She could tell he was getting hard. He turned toward her and scooted up a little farther, and she slid down toward him. He started kissing her ear, then her neck. She thought about the stacks of cashmere hidden deep in her closet as one of his hands moved under the vintage Velvet Underground concert T-shirt (which she’d bought for seventy-five dollars on eBay) and found her right nipple while the other hand slipped under the band of the thirty-six-dollar Cosabella boy shor
ts she’d ordered ten pairs of last week. Her vagina was moist; whether it was still from getting herself off or the way he was rubbing her clit, she couldn’t tell. All she knew was that the last couple times they’d tried to have sex, she’d been so dry that even copious amounts of lube hadn’t helped. “You like that?” he whispered into her ear as he rubbed her clit harder, and she moaned. She did like it, she did, and he flipped her over and pulled her up toward him so he could thrust into her, holding her small, firm tits in one hand and one of her hips in the other. She thought of Natalie.

  All of a sudden, right as she was getting close, he came inside her with a jolt, no warning. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, flipping her back over. “Here, let me…” He started moving down her body, but one of their phones vibrated, and she wriggled up. “It’s okay, Dan,” she said. He didn’t protest.

  “Be right back,” he whispered in her ear and went into the bathroom. She lay on the bed for a moment, listening to him pee, and then glanced down at her phone. Nothing. Then she noticed Dan’s phone on the bed. It must have fallen out of his pants. She didn’t think twice about what she was about to do, just picked it up and looked at the screen. It said: Katya Pasternack—iMessage. Dan must have had his notifications set so you couldn’t read the actual message on the lock screen. She thought for a moment—now the water was running—and typed in Owen’s birthday, Dan’s numerical password for everything. She quickly opened his messages tab, and, without opening the actual message, she read the first couple lines of Katya’s text: hey def can’t meet up later, sorry. See u tomorrow. She heard the water stop running, put the phone on the lock screen, and tossed it back to where it had ended up on the bed. Dan came out of the bathroom, glanced at her, and smiled. She half smiled back.

  25

  Keep Your Friends Close

  “WE HAVE A little problem,” Jason said. He was standing in the doorway of Mack’s office, and his face was scrunched into an expression that Mack couldn’t quite figure out. It didn’t look good, though.

  “What’s that,” Mack said.

  “Invisibletechman,” Jason said.

  “Again?” Mack said. “What the fuck, seriously. What does this guy have against me?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea, but it’s fucked,” Jason said.

  Mack went to @invisibletechman and read the tweet at the top of the page. Y’all gotta listen to this—told you shit at TakeOff didn’t smell right. Mack clicked on the link and immediately heard sound coming out of his computer.

  “You, uh, might want to turn that down,” Jason said. “Or put on headphones.” Mack rolled his eyes but plugged in his headphones and listened. It was a recording from Casper’s good-bye party of Isabel’s outburst.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Mack said. “Someone recorded that?”

  Jason nodded. His face was grim. “Yeah. And this is officially not good for us,” he said. “People are going to start calling and emailing—so just pass everyone on to me. I’m going to say we’re investigating and have no comment, and I’ll tell people off the record that we suspect that it’s a doctored recording.”

  “Wait. Do we think it’s a doctored recording?” Mack said.

  Jason shrugged. “It could be a doctored recording. We just don’t know yet.”

  “Ah,” Mack said. “Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “There’s nothing you really can do, unfortunately.”

  At that moment, Mack’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it—an unknown number was calling. He held the phone up to Jason. “Look,” he said. “It’s already starting.”

  “Don’t answer it, obviously,” he said. “Sit tight. Don’t stress about this too much—I know that’s easy for me to say, but really. Don’t.” He leaned over Mack’s desk and fist-bumped him. “We got this.”

  Mack gave him a weak smile and then watched him go. He wanted to believe that everything was going to be okay—but how was that possible? He thought back to the first day in this office. He’d started the company in one of the incubator spaces on the third floor, but after hiring five people, they had officially outgrown it, and coincidentally, there was a photo-retouching app that was moving out of the seventh floor. The new office had seemed impossibly, gloriously big. That first day, when it was just the six of them still, he bought Nerf guns and that afternoon they had a huge Nerf gun fight. He remembered that Isabel had gotten really into it, shooting the balls and laughing hysterically every time she hit someone. As the space had filled up with tables and computers and people, they’d had fewer and fewer Nerf gun fights, and now he wasn’t sure where the Nerf guns even were.

  His phone was vibrating not just with phone calls and texts but also Twitter notifications.

  Can’t believe this news about @mackmcallister.

  If allegations against @mackmcallister are true, entire NYC tech scene should be asking itself some tough questions.

  @mackmcallister accused of sexual harassment by employee in public. Is this the end for @takeoffapp?

  Isabel still hadn’t been identified, he realized. Well, that was fucked up. Why should he have to bear the brunt of this?

  And then, just when he was about to ping Jason about this injustice, he got an email from Katya Pasternack.

  Hi, Mack, given that this recording leaked this morning, I decided to go ahead and publish my story. Here’s the link. Let me know if you have any additional comment—I’d be happy to update or even write a new piece.

  Oh, fuck yourself, Mack thought. He clicked the link.

  TakeOff Founder Mack McAllister Accused of Sexual Harassment by Ex-Employee

  Isabel Taylor is currently exploring legal options.

  By Katya Pasternack

  The female employee heard on an explosive recording accusing TakeOff founder Mack McAllister of sexual harassment that has been making the rounds of startup Twitter this morning is McAllister’s former assistant Isabel Taylor, TechScene can exclusively reveal. McAllister, the 28-year-old founder of one of the hottest companies in the New York startup scene, was accused by Taylor in front of the entire company at a recent event for a departing employee. Taylor told TechScene she is considering filing a lawsuit against McAllister. She agreed to allow her name to be published.

  “Mack and I were in a casual relationship for a few months, but as soon as I started dating someone else”—reported to be Magic Bean founder Andrew Shepard, who did not respond to TechScene’s request for comment—“he suddenly started freaking out.”

  Taylor claimed that she was forced to quit her job after McAllister “humiliated” her at a meeting with several colleagues in what she said was retribution for rebuffing his attempts to get back together with her—which allegedly included sending unsolicited sexually explicit text messages. “I didn’t want to quit my job. I loved TakeOff. I even used to love working for Mack. But no one should be treated the way I’ve been treated.”

  When reached for comment, a TakeOff representative denied Taylor’s claims and said, “Isabel and Mack had a brief, adult, consensual relationship that ended amicably.”

  TakeOff is reportedly close to closing a round of Series A funding, led by Gramercy Partners, that sources say would value the company at $600 million. A source close to Gramercy Partners said that the firm “had been prepared to make a substantial investment, but now they’re reexamining everything” in light of the news. A spokesperson for Gramercy had no comment.

  Photo: The texts that McAllister allegedly sent to Taylor. Click to reveal.

  Audio: The recording of Taylor’s accusations.

  Mack pinged Jason. I’m calling an emergency all-hands, he wrote on Slack. I need to nip this in the bud before it gets too out of control. Before Jason could respond, Mack had sent an email to employees@takeoff.com, instructing them to meet in the canteen in an hour. He knew he had to speak from the heart or nobody was going to believe him, so—uncharacteristically—he decided not to even think through exactly what he was g
oing to say. Jason finally wrote back: Okay. Whatever you want to do. Not exactly the enthusiastic go-ahead he had been hoping for, but this was an emergency. He had to go with his gut.

  Exactly sixty minutes after he’d sent the email, he stood up in front of the team and cleared his throat. He was going to speak without a microphone—it felt more authentic—and he launched right into it, without any kind of preamble. “I know by this point you all have probably seen the story that was written about TakeOff—about me—in TechScene today,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to be anything but transparent with everyone here—you all are the most brilliant, most inspiring, most creative, most hardworking people in tech. And it’s only fair to all of you that you know the truth.” He paused. No one was talking or checking their phones. He had never stood in front of a room of people so rapt. “The truth is that Isabel Taylor and I did have a relationship. I’m sure many of you can relate to falling for someone you work with, and maybe some of you can even relate to falling for Isabel.” The room was silent. “That was a joke, everyone,” he said, and people laughed as though they had been waiting for his permission, and suddenly the mood seemed to lighten. “And yes, we broke up. These things happen. Was I upset? Sure. Wouldn’t you be?” Again, slightly nervous laughter. He breathed in quietly through his nose and out through his mouth. “And I’m just disappointed that her interpretation of events is so wildly different from mine. But I’m prepared to fight this. I owe it to you all, to fight this. I’m not going to take questions right now, but if you have any, please come see me. I’m happy to discuss this more.” He paused again and looked out into the room. These people, everyone looking at him right now with what seemed to be a measure of approval, or at least acceptance—he had gotten them here. He had built this. And no one, least of all Isabel Taylor, was going to take it away from him without a knock-down, drag-out fight. The room was silent for a moment, and then he saw Jason nodding, and then Jason was clapping, and then a few other people started clapping, and soon the whole room was applauding wildly. “Thank you,” he said.